What does an artist owe to himself and what does he owe to others? That’s one of the questions raised by the National Gallery of Art’s intriguing but frustrating exhibition on photographer Robert Frank.
Forty years ago, Frank produced a book-length essay on this country titled “The Americans.” Coming at the end of the smug, secure decade of the 1950s, it challenged the country’s self-definition, portraying it as rootless, lonely, melancholy and insecure. Critics skewered it. Today, it’s a classic, one of a handful of important books of 20th Century photography that includes Walker Evans’ “American Photographs” and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment.”
Then Frank disappeared. Careful students caught glimpses of him, in films (Frank has made 20 movies and videos in the past 30 years), in occasional writings and most notably in a book of photographs published more than 20 years ago, “The Lines of My Hand.”
Such sightings were rare, however, and as far as the public was concerned, one of the greatest photographers of the last half-century had simply disappeared.
Four years ago, the National Gallery announced that Frank had donated thousands of negatives, contact sheets and work prints to the museum-the raw materials of his artistic life. Since then, the museum has acquired prints of many of his important images and borrowed others to mount “Robert Frank: Moving Out,” the largest showing of his work ever. It is also the National Gallery’s first retrospective for a living photographer, an indication of Frank’s importance.
But this is more than a celebration of an artist’s career; it is an inquiry into his life and into the mysteries of the artistic process.
The exhibition’s curators (Sarah Greenough, curator of photographs at the National Gallery, and Philip Brookman, curator of photography and media arts at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery) offer a balanced view of Robert Frank-early, middle and late. This broad and representative view reveals, though the show carefully avoids making judgments, that nothing Frank has done in the past 40 years equals his early work.
Frank came to the United States from Switzerland after World War II and in a letter to his parents described his reaction to the shock of the new: “Never have I experienced so much in one week as here,” he wrote. “I feel as if I’m in a film. Life here is very different than in Europe. Only the moment counts, nobody seems to care about what he’ll do tomorrow.”
That is precisely the spirit he would capture in “The Americans” a decade later. But first there would be a brief detour into fashion photography, under the tutelage of Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Chafing under the constraints of commercial photography, Frank spent the next few years in Europe and South America. Included in the exhibit is an important early photograph of Peruvian peasants in their floppy hats, arranged to look like a small Andes mountain range. Frank achieves the effect by butting two photographs together, one of the first examples of his fascination with multiple images.
In the early ’50s, Frank made three copies of “Black White and Things,” described as “his most complex book to date” in a wall note. “Black and white are the colors of photography,” Frank said in 1961. “To me, they symbolize alternatives of hope and despair.”
Only 12 of the book’s 34 images are included in the exhibition and they show how Frank manipulates forms, shapes and tones to explore emotional states. But for all of their formal complexity, the pictures do not possess the power or the emotional range he was soon to achieve in “The Americans.” (“Black White and Things” has just been published, so this rare, important book is finally available to the public.)
In April 1955, Frank received a Guggenheim Fellowship to make a “broad, voluminous picture record” of the United States; the fellowship was renewed the following year.
He shot more than 600 rolls of film, made about 1,000 work prints and spent a year selecting and organizing the 83 pictures for “The Americans.” (The exhibit includes 22 photographs from the book and 17 others from the period.)
What Frank found in two years of travel was a great nation with great contradictions: democratic and racist, conformist and free-spirited, generous and hypocritical. It was not so much a civilization as a collection of rootless individuals leading isolated lives, looking out only for themselves, making it up as they went along.
Frank offered viewers jazzy, grainy, black-and-white grab shots. Like a snapshooter with an instinct for the truth of things, he captured the moment, but his moments seem timeless.
The unity of his style and subject matter, of vision and technique, makes “The Americans” a classic. It is Frank’s monument, and perhaps his tomb.
In the early ’60s, Frank abandoned still photography for a decade, putting down his Leica and picking up a movie camera. Greenough points out in a catalog essay that motion pictures were the logical next step for an artist fascinated by sequences. Frank eventually made 21 films and videos and is considered a pioneering influence on independent filmmaking. But none of his films has had the impact of his still pictures.
In the 1970s, Frank again began making photographs. But instead of focusing on the outside world, he documented his own emotions and state of mind. Instead of creating single images, he combined them in sequences and collages and then manipulated them: tearing the prints, scratching the print surface, painting them, inscribing them with his own words: “For my daughter Andrea who died in an airplane crash at Tical in Guatemala on Dec. 23 last year,” he wrote on “Andrea” in 1975. “She was 21 years and she lived in this house and I think of Andrea every day.” It is a powerful piece, but it is Frank’s anguish, not the images, that remain with a viewer.
Frank has continued to explore new technologies and image-making techniques, but his focus has remained the same. His work of the past 20 years is almost a visual diary of his mind and heart. Certainly it is an index to his personal and artistic frustrations, and it receives its most powerful expression in the last gallery, where visitors are greeted by an untitled work from 1989 that calls into question everything Frank has done.
Above a collection of faded prints from one of his videos, Frank has remounted his early photographs. This time he has gathered a stack of them, bound them in wire and nailed them to a backing board. The artist seems to reject the preciousness of the photograph as an art object, and to call into question the honesty and accuracy of any single photograph. Theatrical, flamboyant, heroic and appalling, it is his most interesting work of the past 10 years.
Nearby are other large-scale pieces from the same period: “Moving Out,” a triptych of spaces Frank and people close to him occupied and then abandoned; “Hold Still-Keep Going,” “End of Dream” and “I Want to Escape.” These nervous, edgy images suggest that Frank the immigrant has become another restless native son.
The curators of “Moving Out” say only that Frank’s career has been one of ceaseless change, and that he has refused to create “art” when “truth” is his real goal. But such distinctions ignore one fact: Frank was far more interesting when he told us about the world around him than when he told us what was in his head. If we can see the greatness in his early pictures, we also recognize that what followed is far less involving.
A retrospective is often the record of an artist’s progress: small early successes followed by more ambitious projects, perhaps some false starts, then a new level of synthesis-this pattern repeated until the mature artist is working, near the end, at the peak of his or her powers.
But the Frank exhibition offers none of these satisfactions. This exhibit suggests that for an artist, such progress is only a happy accident.
But whose pictures are these? Is an artist responsible to his public or only to himself? Should Robert Frank have continued to do what he did so well, or did he have no choice but to move on?
One leaves “Moving Out” with a sense of wonder and regret, moved once more by the old images but saddened that the artist who created them had to reject them to hold onto his own artistic life. Could it have been any different? Probably not.
